In part one of their conversation, Alain de Botton and Paul Holdengraber discuss everything from David Hume to the false promises of Romantic love (but mainly the love stuff…).

Alain de Botton on cultural curators…We have ever less time, our minds are assaulted with information at every point, and the tragedy is that we have many, many good ideas in circulation but they just aren’t the best ones, they aren’t prominent enough, either in our own minds or in the culture generally. So there’s always a role for people who want to go down the mineshaft, dig out these ideas, and bring them to the surface.

Alain de Botton on the false promise of Romantic love…We suffer from certain Romantic ideas (with a capital R) and these ideas, though they seem to be the “friends of love” they are in fact the “enemies” of love, and that most of us, if we’re to able to have long-term relationships (which most of us do actually want) will probably have to be disloyal to many of the emotions and ideas that get us into love in the first place. […] Love as we’ve come to know it, from its 18th- and 19th-century heritage, is as a kind of leisured activity that takes place on summer evenings where people are able to go for long walks, admire the sea, the cliffs, the underside of the clouds… But we have a hard time marrying that up with what we sometimes call, in a bad mood, “reality.” Many relationships founder on the contrast.

Alain de Botton on soulmates…The notion that someone can understand you without you having taught them who you are is… catastrophic.

Previous Article

Next Article

What I have learned in the past quarter of a century about relationships is that they require a certain level of humility and sacrifice, and that it will never actually seem mutual. We are all too self-centered and small most of the time. That’s where faith comes in. Faith in the other person.

As far as I can tell, Love is still the substance that makes faith in each other possible — equal parts respect, desire, and appreciation. Love also makes “never seeming mutual” work. Most importantly though, like playing improvisational jazz or writing a letter home or drawering a picture of your childhood home and family, Love is a weird and endless act of creativity that no one will ever really appreciate, sometimes even the one you love.